


J'attendrai

by Thimblerig



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Love in a Dangerous Time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-02
Updated: 2017-10-02
Packaged: 2019-01-08 01:20:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12244344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thimblerig/pseuds/Thimblerig
Summary: The sadness of having to wait, the sweetness of having someone to wait for...





	J'attendrai

**Author's Note:**

  * For [elstaplador](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elstaplador/gifts).



> Suggested soundtrack: “J'attendrai” performed by Rina Kelly. Link to her performance here: https://youtu.be/Uqvr6igV3Wc

She comes out of the night and fog in the middle of your best song.

You’re not going to cede the floor to anyone, not a swinging door and a sudden chill, not a tired woman muffled in a trenchcoat, sparrow-brown hair scraped back under a cap, with a battered satchel and a bulge in her pocket that might be a gun. She’s boring, unremarkable.

 _I will wait,_ you sing, _night and day,  
I will wait forever..._

It’s a popular song, clawing at the heart. Everybody’s lost someone. Even the Nazi pigs lose people and so they come to your little club, thick with cigarette smoke and the sour tang of bad beer, they come to sticky tables and glittering silver stars that only show their foil in the daylight, they come for the brittle vivacity of the dance tunes your tiny band belts out, and then they _stay_ as, sweet and slow, you sing of the sadness of having to wait, and the sweetness of having someone to wait for.

 _For the bird flying_  
_Comes to its nest seeking_  
_Oblivion..._

You’re no Rina Kelly, but you get by.

Jasper, the pianist, caresses the piano keys; you tilt your head, hair piled high in pins and your mouth crayoned vivid red. It’s not a song for sex-appeal, but eyes follow you. Your club is near the border of Vichy France and you get all sorts, really - the German officers in the corner; a band of good French truck-drivers at a regular stop; labourers and shop-keeps scraping time and money for distraction, rough soldiers - more regulars - in from walking the border; a few bright, painted women, _collaboreuses_ plying their charms with the conquerors… hiding any pride they have left behind plucked eyebrows and painted mouths.

She watches you, mantled in a corner, face dull and pale from too much work and not enough food, shadows in her face, mouth an uncompromising line. The only thing about her that catches the light is her eyes, bird-bright and needle-sharp.

 _The wind is bringing distant sounds, watching_  
_At the door I listen_  
_Vainly_...…

Smiling, you meet her eyes briefly and she stills, chapped hands pausing on a half-burned cigarette.

 _I will wait,_ you tell her in song.

**

It’s after midnight when she comes to you.

The last drunks are being slung over the porters’ shoulders, and the floors drearily swept. Two of the officers have gone up-stairs with giggling women on their arms. It’s a dreary, bleary time for the club, though not as bad as daylight’s truthful gleam.

“You want some stockings?” she says.

“I _have_ stockings,” you say brightly.

“Everybody wants stockings; all the silk goes for parachutes.”

“I have connections,” you say, sing-song, shrugging the looseness of your draped robe around the stiffness of your back. The high-heeled pumps you wear for singing pinch your toes, but they’re what you have. You extend one leg, letting the light, peacock-printed cloth fall away, and turn it so the last of the light-bulbs shimmer on the fine silk. Her eyes trace down your calf then flick up to your face.

“Dirty postcards, then, the boys on the front like ‘em.”

It’s a possibility, something to sell to keep the club going, to keep you and your people fed. “What else?”

“Whiskey,” she says, gruff. “The good stuff. Fell off a truck, can’t recall exactly where.”

“Ohh,” you purr, “now we’re talking.”

She stares at you, still wrapped and stiff in her heavy coat, the collar turned up to her ears.

“Come out to my truck and see.”

“My room’s nicer.”

She comes.

**

It’s a heavy coat you take off her, dark, dull wool that doesn’t show the dirt. Your fingers slide over what looks to be a tear from barbed wire, mended and healed with tiny, neat stitches, and hang it on the stand.

She stands, bony and unassuming, in a flannel shirt and solid, heavy trousers, boots she might have taken off a soldier. Her hands work in the air.

You smile at her, and unpin your hair, letting the curls slowly collapse around your shoulders. “It’s alright,” you say, and wait a breath.

She comes for you, hands sliding up your arms under the brilliant sleeves, grasping as a woman in the desert reaches for water. She kisses desperately, growling in her throat, holding you as something delicate.

Later, when you kiss the softness of her belly, she makes other sounds, small and simple as a sleepy bird.

**

“This is new,” you say sleepily, stroking her thigh. It’s a bullet wound, still red and raw.

“Business is hard,” she tells you, low and gruff. “I get by.”

You tug at a loop of her dull brown hair. “I could wash this, before you go. Compliments of the house.”

“I go round smelling like a flower-garden…” she says direly, and shrugs.

“Just soap, then,” you say, and smile.

There’s a squeal of tires outside, then, a tooting of a motor horn, the vicious voices of angry men. Wrapped in your robe you twitch aside a flowery curtain and peer out into the street - an officer’s sleek car almost crashed into a truck going the other way down the street. The driver, hidden in a heavy coat and cap, waves his arms and roars at the two truck drivers. They shrug without apology and reverse rapidly, cracking the canvas side of the truck against a building’s corner and jostling the prisoners packed inside. It’s a _nacht und nebel_ truck, you know, _night and fog._ They often go down this road, taking dissidents and political prisoners to Germany to disappear, transformed into mist. None of them come back… you twitch the curtains shut.

“What was she like?” she asks you suddenly.

Your lips curl. “How do you know there was a she?”

“Everybody’s lost somebody.”

She has a point.

“Small and round,” you say, “with yellow hair. Not like you at all. Sang like a canary, but she was too shy to do it in public. Instead she’d play the piano for me. We did alright.” You shrug. “Now I have Jasper, and we do alright.”

She’d been so very shy, had cried a little the first time you made love, and cried between the kisses when the pair of you ran away from home, money in one valise, jewels in another… And she was brave.

You find the fancy whiskey and pour a slug to spare yourself words, toss it back and feel the burn. “You?” you ask, as the heat of it moves through you.

“Almost all the family I had,” she says. “Now I get by.” You offer the glass but instead she takes the bottle and drinks the last of it down.

**

She’s sleeping, finally, when you examine her coat, looking over the mended tears and the darn where it had been torn by the bullet. There’s a pack of lewd playing cards in one pocket, girls in garters and frothy petticoats and sometimes nothing at all, curled and bent among artistic sculpture, hair in curls and eyes wide, next to a metal lighter and half a pack of cigarettes. In the other is the gun, heavy, next to a practical leatherbound sewing kit.

Folding her other clothes absently, the shirt and scratchy pants and the simple cotton underthings, you watch her curled on her side in your bed, under a star-embroidered quilt, her arms drawn up and hands curled into loose fists, protecting herself even here. Some monster in her dream makes her twitch and she whimpers, slightly, before stifling herself, too cautious to make a sound.

You wait a moment longer, then, with fine little scissors from the sewing kit you unpick the lining of the coat. Hidden beneath it, sandwiched between the layers, is a sheet of bright white silk printed with letters and numbers - a code key.

It is unclear to you how long you sit, with the harsh wool of the coat clutched in your lap. But when you look up her bright eyes are open, watching you.

Finding your voice, trained performer that you are, you say, “You _are_ the Sparrow, aren’t you? They thought - they wanted me to find - it _is_ you.”

She collects herself in the bed, wiry arms coiling down like springs, ready to move.

Harshly you say, “They said I could have her _back,_ do you understand?”

With a harsh oath she springs from the bed, throwing cloth at your head. Deliberately, muffled as you are, you pound on the wall, three times then twice more - the signal for the officers in the other room.

Pulling off the cloth - the starry quilt - you draw it instead around your shoulders. Your window is swinging open and the cold air, the night and the fog, is coming in. She is gone.

You hide your face in your hands, and you wait.

**Author's Note:**

> \- “Night and fog” (nacht und nebel) - this was a term used by the Nazi military administration for vanishing - “transforming into mist” - prisoners, particularly political dissidents, instead of treating them in accord with the dictates of the Geneva Convention. It was intended to intimidate: prisoners not executed within eight days were deported to Germany, never to be heard from again. It is unclear how many people died this way. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nacht_und_Nebel)
> 
> \- The song is “J'attendrai” popularised by Rina Kelly, after being translated from the original Italian “Tornerai”. I used a fairly free translation. 
> 
> More details here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%27attendrai
> 
> \- _hidden behind the lining_ \- somewhere in _Between Silk and Cyanide,_ an account of WWII by Leo Marks, who ran codes and communications for the Allied agents, he mentions printing code key tables on sheets of silk that could be hidden in the linings of agents’ coats - the silk took printing well, was fine enough that it couldn’t be detected by touch, and each code key could be cut off and burned when it had been used. 
> 
> Ref: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/557743.Between_Silk_and_Cyanide


End file.
